Do you remember learning in school about ‘auxiliary verbs’?
These (I remember being told in primary school) are little ‘added’ verbs that have the role of ‘helping’ the main verb.
These thoughts from my distant past came back to me when I read the following sentence in the newspaper: ‘Will Smith’s time under the radar is set to short-lived…’ Eh?
Something is needed in there, isn’t it?
And that ‘something’ is the missing verb ‘to be.’
The sentence should read ‘Will Smith’s time under the radar is set to be short-lived…’
That sounds right, doesn’t it?
At first I thought what this sentence needed what an auxiliary verb—and extra verb to help it along.
Then I read it again—and I realised that (as written by the journalist and published by the newspaper) it had no verb at all!
‘Short-lived’ is not a verb but an adjective.
This journalist has served up (and the paper has published) a verbless sentence.
Which is weird.
We need verbs in sentences.
Verbs are action words.
Verbs are telling us what is happening in the sentence.
I have just bought a copy of Sarah Kaufman’s much-praised book Verb Your Enthusiasm—about how to make verbs work better for us.
It reports that verbs make up about 25% of the English language.
Without verbs nothing happens.
The action in the verb.
In the case of poor Will Smith, the missing verb ‘to be’ is the verb of existence.
If something has ‘being’ it exists.
If its ‘being’ will only survive for a short while, then its existence will come to an end shortly.
This strange verbless sentence was trying to tell us that Will Smith’s visit to Sydney was going undetected (‘under the radar’) but that this would not last.
But to say that, it needed a verb.
At the moment, it wanted to say, Will’s visit was being unnoticed—had no ‘being’ in the public square.
But it left out the verb ‘to be’ that would have said that.
To be a proper English sentence it needed the verb ‘to be.’
I gather many newspapers have largely dispensed with the services of sub-editors—the people who check copy submitted by journalists for errors—and it shows!
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